


Water and its Significance for Catholics

by cassanovic



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Catharsis, Horror Elements, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma, this is not about niall dying but about ronan healing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 20:35:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5470046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassanovic/pseuds/cassanovic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gansey wakes up to the sharpest Ronan he’s ever seen sitting in front of him, legs wide, knees pointing to the ceiling. It might be the alien quality of the light, the shadows pooling in his collarbones; it might be the fact that he’s only wearing a ratty pair of sweatpants and every hard line and every dark corner is suddenly visible.</p><p>Gansey wakes up and his first thought is: something has changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Water and its Significance for Catholics

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariad/gifts).



> i hope you enjoy it :)

Gansey wakes up to the sharpest Ronan he’s ever seen sitting in front of him, legs wide, knees pointing to the ceiling. It might be the alien quality of the light, the shadows pooling in his collarbones; it might be the fact that he’s only wearing a ratty pair of sweatpants and every hard line and every dark corner is suddenly visible.

Gansey wakes up and his first thought is: something has changed. 

“I need to go somewhere,” Ronan says, voice hard, opening and closing his hand against his leg. “I need you to come.”

Gansey swallows and gets up from where he’d fallen asleep against the wall. His knees give slightly for a moment and he stills, lets out a breath. Ronan stays sitting and cranes his neck up to look at him.

“You shaved your head,” says Gansey, quietly. “Last night?”

Ronan ignores him. His mouth curls into something cruel.

“Whatever,” he says, with a wide gesture at the miniature Henrietta sprawling around them. “Look, making it all over again so that it’s yours isn’t going to make you a part of it.” 

Gansey doesn’t flinch. He’s too tired. He walks around Ronan and over an aluminum river, carefully, makes his way to the fridge and opens the door. There’s a carton of orange juice without a cap and he takes it out and drinks.

“We need to leave right now,” says Ronan, very urgently, from behind him. “Let me drive the Pig.”

Gansey, still facing the inside of the fridge, closes his eyes. There’s the hum of something from above: a broken appliance or an insect, maybe. He wonders if it’s a wasp and thinks, which would be more dangerous? That or Ronan?

He turns around to face Ronan and says, “I’m driving.”

-

Ronan sits in the front seat, seat belt draped loosely across his belly, arm dangling out the window with something in his hand. Gansey doesn’t look too closely, but he catches glimpses of it from the corner of his eye – something small, something Ronan is too afraid to hold close to himself. 

They drive down the highway, counting exits like sheep. Skyline Drive speeds past, and Gansey feels his T-shirt sticking to his shoulders. Ronan’s pulled on a tank top stained dark brown with the plastic thread of a tag still in it. A civil war battleground blurs by in the side view mirror. Ronan says, keep left. Then it’s the cloudy green of trees, Ronan telling him to get off the ramp, the liquid orange of the streetlamps in puddles by the side of the road, strange and small in the pale light of day.

Ronan takes him to a ditch. He’s off the car before Gansey pulls over and cuts the engine: standing right on the edge of where the ground dips, hands in his pockets. Gansey steps outside and leans on the side of the window, for a second, watching Ronan’s back muscles clench and unclench under his skin and through his shirt, and then goes over and stands beside him.

The ditch is full. There’s the dry dirt at the bottom of it, and then, on top: there’s bones, fingers, still twitching, a an outstretched hand, like it’s offering something. There’s the head of a man buried so that you can only see from his chin up. His eyes are closed but something is moving beneath his eyelids. 

Gansey can’t stop looking at it all, at the sprawl of it. He breathes, hard. He feels sick.

Ronan takes whatever’s in his clenched hand, inside his pocket, and tosses it in. It glints in the sun before it goes in, dark, rust-colored, shiny. A bundle of something. It leaves his fingers and Gansey sees that Ronan’s nails are edged with blood.

The man in the ditch makes a shape with his mouth and says something. Gansey closes his eyes and swallows and prays to God he’ll open them again and see nothing.

What he sees instead is the man, still speaking, still buried: straight slope of an elegant nose, and full eyebrows, and darkly fluttering eyelids - nothing underneath. Just empty sockets, and past that - nothing. Dirt. Like God made someone beautiful and forgot to put something inside of him. 

Oh, my God, he thinks, at first. It’s Ronan. But then there’s something softer, something gentler, surer, in the curve of his chin - Ronan, before Niall died. When he looked more like -

Niall.

It’s Niall, in the ditch.

“Stop,” says Ronan, throat thick with something, choking (something is so terribly, terribly wrong). “Give me a second. Wait until I fall asleep.” He lays on the ground in a patch of yellow grass and closes his eyes tight. He’s gone easily, Gansey knows, because he’d heard Ronan last night - walking circles around his room, picking up things and putting them down. It’s been like this.

And then: Ronan wakes up. There’s a small slice of time where something ebbs and then comes back, full-strength, like they’re not still in the present but a little ways beyond that - ahead, in the future. A glimpse of it. Gansey blinks and looks from Ronan back to the ditch, which is now filled with water, licking the sides and splashing at his feet, flowing far down the ditch into some uncertain distance.

Ronan makes a soft noise in his throat and leans over to dip his hands in it. Gansey retches and then swallows bile and looks up, at the thin arm of a tree. A breeze picks up and pushes a cloud away, washing the sky clean, making it right again.

Gansey looks down and thinks that maybe that isn’t the only thing being made right, here, by the side of the road - Ronan’s fingers clean again, his eyes closed, his hands shaking.

“You need to sleep more,” he says, to Ronan, voice gentle.

“You need to stop building your fucking city and go to bed,” Ronan retorts, looking at him, eyes full with something. Gansey isn’t sure what. “Come here.”

Gansey obliges, crouches and looks at Ronan eye-to-eye.

Ronan kisses him. Ronan is rough, with his lips. Hungry. Gansey wonders what it is that he needs. What it is that he can’t give to him. Something flutters in his chest and lets himself feel deeply tragic about it.

Then Ronan pulls back and lays back down on the ground again, carefully, face dark, but it’s something in the fold of his brow that Gansey thinks he could’ve seen, before it all, before he lost a father and a home. Before he lost the two things that summed up to become the one thing he cared about in the world.

And then he knows what the fluttering is. It’s relief. It’s the sense that nothing has gone so horribly wrong that it can’t be made into something good again.

“We should go home,” says Ronan, and he looks so, so young.

“Ronan,” Gansey says, face broken, but broken open. Unguarded. “Please get up.”

Ronan feels the ground pressing into his back and laughs. 

**Author's Note:**

> some things that may not have been clear: the ditch is full of niall. this story is about closure.
> 
> i hope this was not too short. i feel that it has done what it was meant to do.
> 
> LOTS OF LOVE. :)


End file.
